Clustering is a server architecture for interconnecting two or more individual servers in order to share application processing loads. A cluster of networked servers may coordinate with one another to host and to back up a plurality of projects.
One limitation in current techniques of server clustering is that all nodes of a cluster are required to host the exact same set of projects. Since there is typically a non-trivial amount of overhead cost for hosting a project, this limitation can be a hurdle to further expansion in large deployments. With this limitation, adding a new project will negatively affect the overall performance of a cluster, while adding another server to the cluster only brings a marginal improvement.
Another limitation in current techniques of server clustering lies in excessive downtime and other negative impacts associated with project maintenance operations. For example, unexpected errors encountered by a single project may cause a server to restart, thereby terminating all other projects hosted by the same server. Maintenance of one project may cause all servers in the cluster to slow down, thus affecting progress of other projects.